Politics
Service chiefs shock govt on persisting insecurity
Adebayo Obajemu
The uptick in cases of kidnappings, banditry, ritual killings and sundry other criminal activity is a source of worry to many Nigerians. In the last two months, it is as if the country is under siege by bandits, kidnappers and Islamist insurgents in the Northeast, unknown gun men and ritual killers, and no place is safe again.
Against the backdrop of boiling surge in violent crimes across the country, three weeks ago, the House of Representatives invited top echelon of Nigeria’s security architecture: service chiefs and the inspector general of police to a parliamentary inquiry on the reasons for this surge in kidnappings and killings of innocent Nigerians.
Of course, Nigeria’s intractable insecurity is often widely believed to be closely linked to the lack of good governance and political will, aloofness and official corruption, the service chiefs at the parliamentary inquest amplified this position as their frustration was discernible from their delivery.
In their full complement, and without mincing words, Service Chiefs spoke truth to power in response to the House of Representatives’ inquiry. Led by the Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, they took turns to lay on the table with uncanny demonstration of their challenges, the issues that have made their operational efficiency and effectiveness an uphill task.
“Ordinarily the House of Representatives in plenary, had invited the Chiefs in the belief and aim of castigating them for letting Nigerians down, as rate of kidnappings, banditry and sundry other crimes soar across the country, but if they (the House of Representatives) had known what would be the Service Chiefs’ response they would not have invited them. The occasion provided the top brass with opportunity to state their own side of the story, and the subtext of that story hurt the House itself and the government”, said Professor Adeagbo Moritiwon, a political scientist in a chat with Business Hallmark.
Dr. Olufemi Omoyele, a social commentator, who is of the department of Entrepreneurship at Osun State University said the “House members looked confused and befuddled as the Service Chiefs’ lamentations poured out in torrential labyrinth, which was an indirect criticism of the executive as well as legislative arms of government.”
According to Omoyele, the lawmakers may have thought twice why they invited the martial chiefs, as the revelations inadvertently hit them hard, having been part of the problem, for their actions and inertia.
Moritiwon said the candour and courage of the officers in talking about the challenges they were facing was commendable, adding that their submission was scary: that despite Nigeria being in the maelstrom of insecurity for more than a decade, with its concomitant wanton killings, kidnappings, banditry, arson, payment of ransoms, militancy and oil theft, it is not yet Uhuru.
The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Musa painted a disturbing canvas that is worrisome, according to him, the situation has got to the extent that prison warders connive with Boko Haram members in their custody in the planning and execution of their felonious crimes, using the bank accounts of these warders to transfer operational funds.
He said the country is on the road to self destruct, because the institutions of the state are often complicit in the ongoing saga of insecurity, adding that the system needed internal cleansing. Boko Haram members kept in prison, according to CDS, and other criminal suspects are routinely released by the judiciary, only for them to return to their evil enterprise with greater cruelty.
The collusion with bandits and terrorists has for long been the past times of the rogue elements of the armed forces .
Hamisu Wadume’s case
For years, there has been talk of internal sabotage within top official circles, and the case of Hamisu Wadume a notorious kidnapper was instructive. Though he was finally jailed in 2022, it took a tortuous prosecutorial route, which started in 2019 until his sentencing three years later.
Wadume, notorious for kidnapping, was first arrested in Ibi, Taraba State, by members of the Intelligence Response Team of the Inspector-General of Police
It was only in July 22, 2022 that the Federal High Court in Abuja finally sentenced Hamisu Bala, popularly known as Wadume, to seven years in jail for escaping from lawful custody and unlawfully dealing in prohibited firearms. But the prosecution failed to prove the charges of kidnapping against him.
The judge, Binta Nyako, found Wadume guilty on counts 2 and 10 of the 13 charges preferred against him and six others by the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF).
She also jailed four of Wadume’s co-defendants charged in the case of tampering with evidence, aiding and abetting, and unlawful possession of firearms. The five convicts include a police officer, Aliyu Dadje, a police inspector.
But on their way to Abuja from Ibi, some soldiers belonging to the 93 Battalion in Takum, Taraba State, led by Tijjani Balarabe, an army captain, aided his escape from the custody of the police personnel.
The Balarabe-led troops allegedly shot at the police personnel in the vehicle conveying Wadume to Abuja.
Three police officers and two civilians were killed while five others were wounded in the attack aimed at freeing Wadume from police custody.
The police would later re-arrest Wadume in Kano.
After their release ( Boko Haram suspects), they often come back to threaten the family members of soldiers, and even the soldiers themselves. On that note, professor Moritiwon stated that there’s a need to overhaul prosecution in order to strengthen prosecutorial competence of the government.
Dr. Adesida Opeyemi, a sociologist warned that the greatest driver of insecurity is mass hunger in the land, with inflation figure hovering around 30.33 per cent, “I can tell you that banditry and kidnapping in the North-west and North-central is feeding directly from an epidemic of hunger.”
The CDS warned, “People are hungry. No matter how well you tell them to keep the peace, they will not because they have to eat and it aids criminality.”
Our porous borders with Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Benin, it bears repeating, worsen insecurity. The CDS emphasised that 1,000 unmanned borders posts of about 4,000 kilometres – 1,600 kilometres shared with our Sahelian neighbours – exacerbate the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the country, and this has been a known fact for decades, aiding the destabilisation of the Nigerian state by Boko Haram, ISWAP and other criminal elements.
In the South-east, Simon Ekpa, living in faraway Finland, has made the region ungovernable with his treasonable and illegal orders to Igbos to sit at home and close their businesses every Monday, over the continued incarceration of Nnamdi Kalu. Thousands of citizens and security personnel, who dared him have been killed by criminal gangs, who take fiendish delight in enforcing Ekpa’s directives. These rogue elements have hijacked the Kalu and IPOB irredentist movement. IPOB has since washed its hands off the sit-at-home orders.
The Chief of Army Staff, Taoreed Lagbaja, was quick to remind all that, “We (soldiers) are not magicians.” This is incontestable; more so when the military have been overstretched and involved in asymmetric combat duties and policing responsibilities in about 33 states, outside their professional remit.
The Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, called attention to gaping shortfall in police personnel, which inevitably puts the policing ratio at 1 to 1000 citizens, as against the UN benchmark of 1- 400 persons.
Prof. Moritiwon said that the IG regrettably did not mention the fact that over 100,000 police personnel protect Nigerian VIPs, in a transactional abuse that is at the expense of the larger populace.
According to the IG himself, the shortage of, at least, four operational vehicles for each of the 1,537 police divisions in Nigeria’s 774 Local Government Areas has had worsening effect on performance of the force.
According to the Chief of Air Force, Hassan Abubakar, the rising cost of JetA1, or aviation fuel, and the mismatch between its present price of N1,050 per litre and the N360 budgeted for it, is an operational challenge.
The armed services, according to him, does not have a different foreign exchange market or regime for the ease of procurement of their fighting equipment.
Given the worst case scenario submissions of the Service Chiefs, it’s clear that the road to redemption is still long, made so by the failure of leadership over the years.
Data from SBM Intelligence reveals that about 629 people were killed, within President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 45 days in office, a significant pointer to the fact that the high incidence of carnage during the Muhammadu Buhari regime, which saw the death of 63,111 people in seven years, is not yet over.
According to the Nigeria Security Tracker, it is not likely the trend will go down any time soon. At the end of 2020, the UNDP data shows that 350,000 people were killed by the Islamist insurgency in the North-East.
The Service chiefs also said Nigeria would have by now destroyed the terrorism financing ring fuelling its insurgencies if the 400 terror financiers that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), helped it to identify in April 2021 were prosecuted in tandem with anti-terrorism law.
In the UAE, Messres Abubakar Ado Musa, Salihu Yusuf Adamu, Bashir Ali Yusuf, Mohammed Ibrahim Isa, Ibrahim Ali Alhasan and Surajo Abubakar Muhammad were promptly arrested, put on trial and convicted. In one fell swoop, they transferred $782,000 from Dubai to Nigeria. While Salihu Adamu received a life sentence, Surajo and others were slammed with 10-year jail terms each. Ironically, more than two-and-a-half years later, Nigeria is still shielding them. Duplicity such as this will affect whatever remedy the N3.25 trillion in the 2024 budget for security is set to achieve.
These contradictions give amplitude to the concerns expressed by the military chiefs.
“So, it gets to a stage where the security forces are not even willing to do anything,” one of them starkly told members of the House of Representatives.”